Pinning for the Fiords
Te Anau, or the gateway to the Fiordland National Park, is mind blowingly beautiful.

Hillsides, snow capped peaks, vivid blue glaciers and seemingless bottomless dark lakes surrounded by greens and browns of trees, finished off with alpine flowers and meadows of golden tussoc grasses really take your breath away. Every so often you simply stop and stare - its just magnificent beyond words. (well its beyond the vocabulary of a mathematician, could start to mention fractals, but guess this would wreck the ambiance.)

Couldn't decide whether to visit Doubtful sound, or Milford sound, so decided to visit both. For the record, neither sound is a sound, both are Fiords (sounds are carved by rivers, fiords are carved by glaciers), guess it would cost too much to change the stationary cupboards / literature.... This minor technical point aside both offered up nature at it most raw, rocks barely formed still moving and quaking into shape, bottle-nosed dolphins swimming in the wake of our cruise ship and sealions basking on the rocks, not to forget the hundreds of birds. kayaked one afternoon, giving a really close up view, then swam just to ensure total immersion.

After these fiords we journeyed inland, taking most of a day to reach Lake Tekapo, honestly pronounced 'take a poo'. Luckily for us no-one has taken the name literally and it remains the brightest blue of any lake or sea I've seen. Apparently the reason its so blue is the particles of rock form an emulsion rather than a sediment, increasing the amount of blue light refracted back - lets just say its brighter than a really bright blue sky. In the evening we signed up for 'Skywatching', viewing lots of constellations, the milky way, Saturn + rings, the southern lights and other complicated sounding dots of light far enough away so even if the martians living there are offended by what I'm typing I'll be dead before they've read this.

From Tekapo we've driven back to Christchurch, just polished off a fantastic pizza and a couple of cold beers... Beautiful scenery, lovely weather, Pizza and beer. My kind of country.

Next we head north, to the warmer and more rugged parts of the country. Here we might attempt some of the suicidal activities favoured by the nutters, probably something involving plummeting, elastic, parachute material, sharp rocks, fast flowing water and speed. Or we might not.

- posted by Adrian @ 8:32:00 AM